Spam?

[gagaplex]

It's obvious now that these spam-bots keep coming back again and again. I don't know enough about administrating a forum, but is there some way you can stop this from happening? Make registering more difficult or something? Or have the forum delete repeat-posts automatically or something?

[miumiaou]

you know, the only thing to do is having a CAPTCHA or anything that make difficult for these spam bot to register, we already have the second thing but apparently, it's not working. and perhaps having more moderator but it's Matt's decision (but you can ask if you want, to moderate a forum is not as hard as it look, especially this one because everyone is nice)

[matt]

I did add a captcha, which should have made it very difficult for a bot to register. Are we getting new registrations from spam bots? Has the spam just been cleared before I logged in? Maybe I need to come up with a better question, or maybe they are already in the system. Hmm... I'll have to do more investigation. Any more suggestions would be appreciated! I'm new to this whole running a forum thing.

[miumiaou]

I deleted a bot before you logged in (as well as all the post he made) check in the administrator control panel for all details

[RightClickSaveAs]

I did add a captcha, which should have made it very difficult for a bot to register. Are we getting new registrations from spam bots? Has the spam just been cleared before I logged in? Maybe I need to come up with a better question, or maybe they are already in the system. Hmm... I'll have to do more investigation. Any more suggestions would be appreciated! I'm new to this whole running a forum thing.

I did a little research a while ago for another board I help admin, basically Captchas are pretty easy for spambots to bypass. Most programs they use have OCR technology that can beat it, and in some cases they even just hire real people to register and post spam.

There are a few options I know of, the problem is balancing it so it doesn't get too annoying for you by having to spend too much time setting up all this stuff, and for the users by making everyone jump through a bunch of hoops to register and post:

• Require all new registrations be approved manually before they can post (this can be a pain, depending on how many people are registering)
• Use anti-spam plugins, there seem to be quite a few available for phpBB. These can generate false positives though, as some of them use some fuzzy algorithms to do their thing, and it's not easy to tell exactly how they work
• You can sign up for websites like http://www.projecthoneypot.org/index.php which keep blacklists of known spam servers

Everyone's been really on top of keeping the boards cleaned up, I haven't seen any of the messages last for long!

[matt]

I did a question where it says what is the first 3 letters of the company (Infinitap Games) and the last 3... I did some research, and supposedly that is the best captcha since it can't be answered it a google search, and supposedly all the other ones have been cracked. I guess maybe that's not good enough? :-/ I'll look into it some more when I have some time.

[RightClickSaveAs]

Oh yeah, I forgot you had that, it's been a while since I registered. Hmm, a very good possibility they're using human spammers then. They'll pay people tiny amounts of money to just type in answers to security questions, or make fake porn sites where the users have to enter the answers to challenge questions like this, which are actually being used to make spam accounts. It's some crazy stuff.

edit: article about it: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/01/vir ... ecurity%29

[matt]

It seems like we only had 3 spammer user accounts, and they are all banned. No new accounts have been created, so hopefully my new question has filtered them out - at least for now. While I'm sure someone could get through our security I don't think spamming to our 300 some users justifies more tan an automated spam bot.

[Stefan8000]

if you need a moderator only for looking for spam on the site, i can do this. i could check the site from time to time, and look, if there are spammers. just write me a pm, if you want an additional moderator.

[matt]

Thank you so much for volunteering! I think (hope?) we are doing ok with regard to spam at the moment, but I will be sure to let you know if we need additional help!